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Abstract

Our capabilities of both generating and collecting data have been increasing rapidly in the last several decades. Contributing factors include the widespread use of bar codes for most commercial products, the computerization of many business, scientific and government transactions and managements, and advances in data collection tools ranging from scanned texture and image platforms, to on-line instrumentation in manufacturing and shopping, and to satellite remote sensing systems. In addition, popular use of the World Wide Web as a global information system has flooded us with a tremendous amount of data and information. This explosive growth in stored data has generated an urgent need for new techniques and automated tools that can intelligently assist us in transforming the vast amounts of data into useful information and knowledge. This book explores the concepts and techniques of data mining, a promising and flourishing frontier in database systems and new database applications. Data mining, also popularly referred to as knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), is the automated or convenient extraction of patterns representing knowledge implicitly stored in large databases, data warehouses, and other massive information repositories. Data mining is a multidisciplinary field, drawing work from areas including database technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, statistics, pattern recognition, knowledge based systems, knowledge acquisition, information retrieval, high performance computing, and data visualization. We present the material in